Interesting solution, but the reason why I use Dropbox is due to the ever increasing storage space limit for non-premium users. I have about 6 GBs of space available to me, and as soon as I get remotely close to that capacity, they usually give me an additional half of a GB.
Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive
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Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive
#12I've racked up 7.9GB on my free Dropbox account. Until there is an alternative that offers more for free, I probably wouldn't consider switching. However, I'm encouraged by the amount of cloud hosting services emphasizing privacy, maybe at some point dropbox will follow suit.
Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive
#13I've racked up 7.9GB on my free Dropbox account. Until there is an alternative that offers more for free, I probably wouldn't consider switching. However, I'm encouraged by the amount of cloud hosting services emphasizing privacy, maybe at some point dropbox will follow suit.
Microsoft just upped their SkyDrive to 25 gigs I believe.
Edit: Actually, I guess that's for their basic paying account.
Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive
#14I've seen a lot of people recommend Lastpass lately, but couldn't the government force Lastpass to create a backdoor for them to get the passwords before they are encrypted? I'd also worry about a catastrophic event of Lastpass losing those passwords somehow, and then remaining locked out of many websites. And what about Bittorent Sync with an old PC as an alternative? They even have an iOS app now.
I personally use keepass and keepassx (the alpha compatible with keepass2.x) and sync my passwords with SpiderOak. That's worked pretty well for me, and I don't actually have to trust a website with my passwords. Even if there's an insecurity in SpiderOak, they'd only get my encrypted keepass database which they'd then have to also decrypt.
I definitely recommend keepass over lastpass.
Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive
#15I've seen a lot of people recommend Lastpass lately, but couldn't the government force Lastpass to create a backdoor for them to get the passwords before they are encrypted? I'd also worry about a catastrophic event of Lastpass losing those passwords somehow, and then remaining locked out of many websites. And what about Bittorent Sync with an old PC as an alternative? They even have an iOS app now.
I've had this worry as well, in regards to loosing passwords. I still believe writing everything down on a piece of paper can help. I have a little black journal that I carry with me everywhere that has all my passwords in it. Typing them in is the issue when they are longer strings, and mixed symbols. Only issue is protecting that journal.. Hopefully I can eat the pages if things were to arise. Ha
> Only issue is protecting that journal
Or losing it.
Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive
#16I've seen a lot of people recommend Lastpass lately, but couldn't the government force Lastpass to create a backdoor for them to get the passwords before they are encrypted? I'd also worry about a catastrophic event of Lastpass losing those passwords somehow, and then remaining locked out of many websites. And what about Bittorent Sync with an old PC as an alternative? They even have an iOS app now.
I've had this worry as well, in regards to loosing passwords. I still believe writing everything down on a piece of paper can help. I have a little black journal that I carry with me everywhere that has all my passwords in it. Typing them in is the issue when they are longer strings, and mixed symbols. Only issue is protecting that journal.. Hopefully I can eat the pages if things were to arise. Ha
If you are sufficiently paranoid about having to destroy the notebook, tissue paper and water soluble ink go a long way to making it easier. I made about a dozen for a murder mystery party about two years ago and still have one lying around somewhere. A small waterproof bag should make sure it isn't inadvertantly damaged in the rain.
Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive
#17One fail in the article:
"It’s worth saying at this point that I don’t, to my knowledge, do anything wildly illegal."
The definition of illegal varies over time and you have no control over it at all.
Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive
#18SpiderOak does have one problem. It has no arm build for linux (and they apparently have no plans to make one soon). If you frequently use a Raspberry Pi or linux on an arm Chromebook then you'll be out of luck on syncing your files.
I wish they'd release simple sourcecode for a headless sync client or that someone would reverse engineer it enough for that to happen. As it is, you can sshfs mount a folder synced by one of your x86 computers, but that's definitely not ideal.
Other than that complain I've enjoyed using SpiderOak and it's a great piece of software.
Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive
#19Chicago? Last time I checked, that city is within the jurisdiction of the United States and not immune to national security gag letters. No thanks. Swiss based Wuala.com is a much better solution.
Valid point. Conversely though (I'm probably over simplifying here) wouldn't this require some sort of secret instructions in the encryption software to send the user's key to HQ? Wouldn't said transmission be detectable by logging traffic from the encryption program? Granted many won't do that but it would only take one person sniffing packets on their machine to reveal it.
The password would be a number of bytes. They could easily use stenography and hide it in an upload or download of the file. Or have an update that would weakly encrypt the data, or encrypt and decrypt to a key known to them, making it trivial to retrieve the data.
Without the source, their security is meaningless. You've just given a closed source application access to the network, and to your files. You've already lost the game.
Edit: Thinking about it, this is the real problem with encryption: the good is the enemy of the perfect. A 90% solution is worse than a half assed one, because you know not to trust the bad solution.
Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive
#20One fail in the article: "It’s worth saying at this point that I don’t, to my knowledge, do anything wildly illegal." The definition of illegal varies over time and you have no control over it at all.
He's almost certainly done something illegal.
http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.asp...